Best 335 quotes in «sympathy quotes» category

I couldn't think of a reply except No, so I said, 'Sure.

I do not believe it possible for one to genuinely love Truth more than people (or vice versa). One might fall into the snare of loving the search more than people, or the pride of having exposed something or someone, but not the truth itself. For if you love Truth you love people; because to love people at all and without illusion, you must also love the truth about them.

I don't know, I can't know, but I almost did.

I don't want to alarm anyone, but everywhere we go I see Alec Baldwin. It's like he's following us.

I even felt a touch of sympathy for the difficulties he had faced in his life, however stupid and repulsive the shape of that life might appear to me.

If a person's mind is controlled by forces of revenge and jealousy, it cannot express love & sympathy. And even if they show love and sympathy to others it will yield no good result. The thought will not be reflected in love but in hate.

If art does not enlarge men's sympathies, it does nothing morally.

I felt ashamed for having judged him so harshly without knowing the real boy. His one offense against me―goaded by Charlie’s bullying character―was easy to forgive.

I felt the nauseous shiver in my stomach—everything from rage to empathy to morning sickness—that I had grown used to and now thought of as being love.

I felt my own self-sufficiency, my own Walden Pond, seeping out of me as if I'd sprung a leak. Self soaked into everything around me—the floor, the walls, the one window, the grass. The words on the page.

If everything stays the same, it seems possible for someone to come back.

I found it hard to write the bits where the things that were at first surprising or even shocking became normal incrementally until I couldn't see that they were anything but normal, because everything else had shifted just one centimetre here and one centimetre there, moving at the speed fingernails grow, until finally everything just clicked into exactly the wrong place.

If we are genuinely concerned about engaging young people, particularly those that are vulnerable or at risk, we must listen to them properly.

If you truly have compassion in your heart, show it by keeping your doubts to yourself and sharing your hope with those who love change!

If you're looking for sympathy you'll find it between shit and syphilis in the dictionary.

If you read a book set in Kars and put me in it, I'd like to tell your readers not to believe anything you say about me, anything you say about any of us. No one could understand us from so far away." "But not one believes in that way what he reads in a novel," I said. "Oh, yes, they do," he cried. "If only to see themselves as wise and superior and humanistic, they need to think of us as sweet and funny, and convince themselves that they sympathize with the way we are and even love us. But if you would put in what I've just said, at least your readers will keep a little room for doubt in their minds.

Ignorance may be bliss, but only if it outweighs curiosity. Curiosity is a gateway drug to sympathy.

I hope when this is done I'll be able to get back into my happy gardening vibe that was so healthy for me. I want to go back to my routine and my morning ritual with the compost, but it will probably be that my life will split in two. New Leaf Gardening in Wood Green will be happening in parallel to a fantasy that runs along the bottom of that screen like a ticker. Alice will be fine. Rabbit will stay up tonight, and every night. Resending and resending, reopening the page to see if she has responded, if anyone has. The spinning wheel will make my eyes hurt and everything else will go dark.

I had shelved expectations of another kiss; the intensity of not kissing now worked almost as well—the proximity and denial.

[January 1944] As to this country, I have been lecturing now for three years to the troops and their attitude is the same. They don’t believe in concentration camps, they don’t believe in the starved children of Greece, in the shot hostages of France, in the mass-graves of Poland; they have never heard of Lidice, Treblinka or Belzec; you can convince them for an hour, then they shake themselves, their mental self-defence begins to work and in a week the shrug of incredulity has returned like a reflex temporarily weakened by a shock. Clearly all this is becoming a mania with me and my like. Clearly we must suffer from some morbid obsession, whereas the others are healthy and normal. But the characteristic symptom of maniacs is that they lose contact with reality and live in a phantasy world. So perhaps it is the other way around: perhaps it is we, the screamers, who react in a sound and healthy way to the reality which surrounds us, whereas you are the neurotic, who totter about in a screamed phantasy world because you lack the faculty to face the facts! Were it not so, this war would have been avoided, and those murdered within sight of your daydreaming eyes would still be alive!

I love men. Rather, I love little parts of their bodies, not the perfect parts, but rather their odd features and their unique traits that make of them stand out of this cookie cutter world we live in. Throw a name at me, and I can instantly tell you which feature makes my heart go thumpedy-thump. Cropper Rowe: lucious, mocha brown-colored mole on the back of his neck. Derek: long yet narrow sideburns. Thorsten: thick nose, which he broke skiing. Milo: jet black hair, slicked back to reveal forehead and a small dimple. Vincent: lower jawline as it curves up to his ears and the way his stubble grows on it. Thayer: his waist and how he wears his jeans low enough to expose his appendectomy scar. And I love Eugene's eyes. Not that they are clear blue, but that they have a kind shape. It sounds cliché, but they are soft, and when I look into them, I feel I've known him forever. The sadness still lingers deep inside them, but he smiles a lot. Maybe I'm mistaken and life has been kind to him. Maybe he's the positive kind of fellow for whom smiling comes easily, despite it all.

I know I only want him,' she said between sobs, the syllables all wrong, 'because he doesn't want me. How is that even possible?' 'It's normal to want what we can't have,' I said soothingly. 'No, I mean how can he not want me?

I know you want me to feel some sympathy for them, but that's not who I am. I care only about those I know, and even then, not all that deeply. Strangers get nothing from me.

I like spending time with healthy people whose brains are turned on.

I mean, you may cause others a spot of bother by your weaknesses, perhaps, but coping with you may possibly increase their strength and sympathy. But if you sin deliberately, even if it seems only against yourself--well--you won't be the only one to suffer. You may even be the one who suffers least.

I recognized exactly where she was—that state where you’re able to hold it together as long as absolutely no one talks to you or touches you with any amount of sympathy.

I no longer felt I could try to belong with these people.

In some cases, it is the woman’s stomach—not her heart—that has left her man for another.

In some rare cases, a friendship between two people benefits both of them, and what’s more, in some rarer cases, it benefits both of them equally.

In the last week I felt her withdrawing. What was once everywhere, an ocean I imagined myself to be drowning in, was now barely deep enough to bathe in. I saw her warmth draining away and I couldn't stop it.

In the months following James' death, on thought had returned time and again as she passed others in the street. What secrets did these people hold? What had they endured? She wondered how many people rushing in and out of shops, or on their way to their work, had lost a love, or known deep disappointment or grief, fear, or want, yet summoned the resilience to go on. Those lines across foreheads, those mouths downturned --- what were the ruts on life's road that wrought such marks, those signs of scars on the soul?

Roses are like kamikaze love pilots. Roses are like suicide love bombers.

I saw her note the way I hovered over the various ethnicities on the form. First the 'white' box, then to the airspace over the 'black' box, a kind of momentary hesitation, a protest of stillness, a staring into the abyss of everything I did not know about myself. She, like me, was made of halves.

I'm going to have to get an entirely new social scene if I want to avoid him,' she said, hunting for evidence of him amongst her friends' feeds. I made a sympathetic face, but my heart leapt up onto her, beat its fists on her heart, yelled, Me Me Me!

In all our lives, however, there are many days when we die a little, when we are wounded by loss or failure, or by fear, or by seeing the suffering of others for whom we are able to offer only pity, for whom we are powerless to offer aid, we are beyond mercy.

In many cases, it was the woman’s stomach—not her heart—that fell for her man.

Instantly I remembered everything I hated about him. But it was, in a way, comforting to know that he had not changed at all.

In the Critique of Practical Reason, Kant makes it quite clear that sympathetic feelings are often welcome, amiable, desirable, beautiful. They can under certain conditions be good objectively, all things considered. But they are not morally good (V 82.18–25). A happy, well-rounded character is an ideal that lies beyond the sphere of Kant’s conception of morality.

In this hour, Siddhartha stopped fighting his fate, stopped suffering. On his face flourished the cheerfulness of a knowledge, which is no longer opposed by any will, which knows perfection, which is in agreement with the flow of events, with the current of life, full of sympathy for the pain of others, full of sympathy for the pleasure of others, devoted to the flow, belonging to the oneness.

I sank back, deeper into the parallel universe I had found.

I saw a doctor. I went in case there were any remnants of the summer inside me—sticky, slender fish bones that needed to be scraped into the bin. He was dismissive of my concerns and said my body would have let me know by now. Did I have what was known as female intuition? I said I'd had my feminine intuition somewhat scrambled in the past.

I suspect that 'Kindness and Cruelty' and 'Mercy and Justice' all have secret affairs, as though they rendezvous only within certain sophisticated souls: those who hate being offensive, but love telling the truth.

it has to be emphasized that if the pain were readily describable most of the countless sufferers from this ancient affliction would have been able to confidently depict for their friends and loved ones (even their physicians) some of the actual dimensions of their torment, and perhaps elicit a comprehension that has been generally lacking; such incomprehension has usually been due not to a failure of sympathy but to the basic inability of healthy people to imagine a form of torment so alien to everyday experience.

It continues to impress me how fluently Americans, even immigrants like her, speak of their achievements.

I think that's quite true. and in fact the people who understand this the best are those who are carrying out the control and domination in the more free societies. like the U.S. and England, where popular struggles have have won a lot of freedoms over the years and the state has limited capacity to coerce. It is very striking that it's precisely in those societies that elite groups—the business world, state managers and so on—recognized early on that they are going to have to develop massive methods of control of attitude and opinion, because you cannot control people by force anymore and therefore you have to modify their consciousness so that they don't perceive that they are living under conditions of alienation, oppression, subordination and so on. In fact, that's what probably a couple trillion dollars are spent on each year in the U.S., very self-consciously, from the framing of television advertisements for two-year olds to what you are taught in graduate school economics programs. It's designed to create a consciousness of subordination and it's also intended specifically and pretty consciously to suppress normal human emotions. Normal human emotions are sympathy and solidarity, not just for people but for stranded dolphins. It's just a normal reaction for people. If you go back to the classical political economists, people like Adam Smith, this was just taken for granted as the core of human nature and society. One of the main concentrations of advertising and education is to drive that out of your mind. And it's very conscious. In fact, it's conscious in social policy right in front of our eyes today. Take the effort to destroy Social Security. Well, what's the point of that? There's a lot of scam about financial problems, which is all total nonsense. And, of course, they want Wall Street to make a killing. Underlying it all is something much deeper. Social Security is based on a human emotion and it's a natural human emotion which has to be driven out of people minds, namely the emotion that you care about other people. You care. It's a social and community responsibility to care whether a disabled widow across town has enough food to eat, or whether a kid across the street can go to school. You have to get that out of people's heads. You have to make them say, "Look, you are a personal, rational wealth maximizer. If that disabled widow didn't prepare for her own future, it's her problem not your problem. It's not your fault she doesn't have enough to eat so why should you care?

It never ceased to amaze me how she just had the facts always, in her head. It occured to me that if, or when, she died, a whole load of facts, a body of knowledge, might disappear without a trace.

It is 23.32 p.m. I still believe in symmetry, so this will be the last part. You've reached an end if you come back to where you started. I also remain superstitious about certain numbers. I use 23 and 32 for my lottery tickets, for example. It extends to dates. I still see signs.

It is humanly impossible to be selfless. As a matter of fact, human beings are inherently selfish.

It is the weak that expresses aggressiveness to show strength. But real strength, it's in the gentle.

It is such an easy thing to do—to touch another in sympathy—but it is such a hard thing too.